Challenge

The Raiffeisen Group—the third largest bank in Switzerland—wanted to extend the experience of their existing e-banking app to leverage content in their Adobe Experience Manager (AEM) sites. Netcentric, a digital service provider and specialist in AEM, were chosen to extend the reach of Raiffeisen’s content sources feeding the app, building on the base of the AEM instance they’d already built for the client.

Solution

The Netcentric team wanted to leverage their Angular skills and develop both iOS and Android apps simultaneously. NativeScript’s power as an open source framework for building truly native mobile apps with Angular, TypeScript or JavaScript without web views stood out. The team didn’t want to have to re-learn any major constructs, so being able to leverage their web-based skillset—Angular in particular—was key.

Result

The Netcentric development team was allocated six months for the project and completed it in four, leveraging native mobile technologies to extend a cross-platform app for Raiffeisen Bank. The app is a key part of Raiffeisen’s digital strategy, linking customers to their local banks through an eye-catching interface and a news feed filled with relevant articles, events and deals.

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Industry

Digital Solutions

Products used

NativeScript

Challenge

The Raiffeisen Group is the third largest bank in Switzerland serving 3.7 million clients at 930 locations throughout the country.

Raiffeisen wanted to extend the experience of their existing e-banking app to leverage existing content in their Adobe Experience Manager (AEM) sites and smoothly guide users through the app to relevant, personalized content at their local bank. Besides the existing content, there was data being pulled in from several different sources, such as subsites that didn’t necessarily run on AEM.

Netcentric, a digital service provider and specialist in AEM, were chosen to extend the reach of Raiffeisen’s content sources feeding the app, building on the base of the AEM instance they’d already built for the client.

Solution

“The solution had to have a cross-platform output for both iOS and Android, so saving time by avoiding separate siloed app development was critical,” says Evan Payne, a Netcentric senior frontend software engineer. “The central data here originated from five different sources, a number that might increase in the future. Therefore, we had to pull that data into AEM, convert it all into the same format, then hand it back out in small bits to the app.”

The Netcentric team evaluated their development platform options including Ionic and React Native. They encountered “major issues with Ionic listviews getting out of sync,” says Payne, and veered away from React Native due to the development team’s “desire to leverage their Angular skills and develop both iOS and Android apps simultaneously.”

NativeScript’s power as an open source framework for building truly native mobile apps with Angular, TypeScript or JavaScript without web views stood out. The team didn’t want to have to re-learn any major constructs, so being able to leverage their web-based skillset—Angular in particular—was key. The development team opted for NativeScript.

“We could work rapidly because of the combination of the familiar tooling along with a fast feedback cycle provided by the Apple and Google App Stores’ development workflows,” says Payne. “This speed also led to an excellent level of collaboration with Raiffeisen during the development process, and resulted in a polished app client going into production.”

The NativeScript community is rich with user code and documentation contributions, so the Netcentric development team leveraged Slack and Github when they had questions. They found the Slack community to be very helpful and with most of their issues already encountered previously, solutions were readily available. On other occasions, Github filled the void by validating issues between NativeScript and Angular.

“Another key factor for choosing to adopt NativeScript was the open source aspect and permissive nature of the license model,” adds Payne. “Netcentric became an active contributor to NativeScript source code through this model.”

Results

The Netcentric development team was allocated six months for the project and completed it in four.

The app—Piazza—is a key part of Raiffeisen’s digital strategy, linking customers to their local banks through an eye-catching interface and a news feed filled with relevant articles, events and deals. On their first visit, each customer is asked where they live. For every subsequent visit, the customer journey always starts with the local bank. This is done across all 255- plus bank websites and the corresponding apps.

The solution not only ensures a dynamic, personalized user experience for customers, but also continuity for the brand and allows the local banks’ entrepreneurial flair to shine through. Thanks to stable data strategy that underpins everything, Raiffeisen can derive valuable insights that power a strong uplift in leads.

“By using a technology like NativeScript, we gave our Netcentric frontend teams the power to build amazing native mobile apps,” says Payne. “This enables us to do more on mobile than we could ever do before.”

About Netcentric

Netcentric is a digital service provider that transforms customer experiences for the world’s top brands by unleashing the full potential of the Adobe Experience Cloud. We support clients throughout the entire process chain - from consulting and development through to marketing operations - helping them execute their digital strategy. Our leadership in the industry is rooted in our expertise in integrating the Adobe digital marketing technology. As part of the Cognizant Digital Business, we are able to provide our clients with an enhanced portfolio of business critical digital experience solutions, strengthening our combined position as a leading customer experience player in Europe. www.netcentric.biz or follow us @NetcentricHQ

About NativeScript

NativeScript is an open source platform for building Native mobile applications, supported by Telerik, a Progress company. For more information, please visit www.nativescript.org

One skillset. One code base.

NativeScript provides you with an all-inclusive toolkit to build native mobile applications with the best possible developer experience. It’s as simple as building a web app, but with all the performance you would expect from native.

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